A atenuação retórica em artigos de pesquisa: um estudo contrastivo com base em corpora

Abstract

This thesis investigates, from a rhetoric-contrastive perspective, the uses and functions of rhetoric mitigation metadiscursive marks (here hedging devices) in research articles produced by Brazilian and German authors and understood as specialized texts (HOFFMANN, 1998), inserted in the expert-expert communicative context (PEARSON, 1998). To achieve this goal, the present study aims at answering the following questions: (a) how often are hedging strategies employed in the introduction and conclusion sections? (b) what is the relationship between the number of hedges in each subcorpus and the rhetorical characteristics of each analyzed section? (c) how often do the lexico-grammatical items performing the role of hedges appear in each subcorpus? The starting point for the investigation was the assumption that texts belonging to the same genre but written in different languages present striking rhetorical distinctions. Such differences in academic writing can be described by the use of hedges as discourse-pragmatic elements which characterize the "modus dicendi" of a given knowledge area; in the present case, Medicine. A corpus of 120 research articles from national and international medical journals was built, including texts written in German and Portuguese; the articles were collected from the CAPES periodics website. This corpus consists of 60 Medicine articles written in Portuguese and 60 articles written in German, divided into two subcorpora, namely, Corpus 1: Medicine-German and Corpus 2 : Medicine-Portuguese. The former is made of two subcorpora, (i) German Medicine Introduction (MAI) and (ii) German Medicine Discussion (MAD); the latter is also subdivided into two parts, (i) Portuguese Medicine Introduction (MPI) and (ii) Portuguese Medicine Discussion (MPD). The data were analyzed and processed in accordance with the Corpus Linguistics methodological principles, in an instrumental application of its methods. The data were treated with the help of a linguistic analysis software called WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 1997), version 3.0, especially the Wordlist and Concord tools. In order to investigate and analyze the uses and functions of the hedges, from the Interactional Metadiscourse (HYLAND, 2005) and Intercultural Rhetoric (CONNOR, 2008) perspectives, given the corpora collected, we have proposed a classification model, in accordance with the taxonomies proposed by Hyland (2005), Cabrera (2004) and Martín-Martín (2008). The results of the analysis have pointed to the occurrence of a largest number of hedges, in both languages, in the discussion section of the articles, followed by the introduction section. Both present a high number of occurrences of indetermination devices (epistemic expressions, such as modal verbs, lexical verbs, semi-auxiliary verbs, and modal adjectives / adverbs) and disagentivization (impersonal expressions, passive voice).We can therefore conclude that the authors of the Medicine research articles, both those in Portuguese and in German, employ the same amount of hedges in order to achieve the communicative purposes of the research paper genre, given the position the authors occupy in the academic community and the interpersonal relationship they wish to establish with the audience. This research contributes to minimize the gap in the studies on hedging under a contrastive perspective, based on corpora of scholarly texts in Portuguese and German in the Medicine area.